Victim’s husband was in Scotland when told she had been killed

AN OMAGH man was in Scotland attending the World Pipe Band championships in August 1998 when he was informed of his wife’s death in the Market Street atrocity.

Ann McCombe was one of three workers in Watterson’s who died in the explosion.

Her husband, Stanley, had been attending the championships with his son, Clive, when news of the bomb emerged.

He spoke of their efforts to find out more information about what had happened, and how the journey home by boat early on the Sunday morning was the ‘worst and longest journey’ of his life.

“It was not until after 8pm on the Saturday night that my brother phoned to tell me that Ann was missing. That was when it really hit home,” said Stanley, whose commemoration of his wife was read at the inquiry by the family solicitor, John Fox.

“I thought there was no way that Ann would be missing. She would have contacted someone in the family and this certainly got me thinking the worst.

“I remember saying to people that Ann was dead and there was no doubt it. I just went to pieces.

“My Minister had gone to the temporary morgue and had identified Ann. That was when my first fears were confirmed.”

Mr McCombe said that when they arrived home on the Sunday morning they could feel ‘death in the air.’

He said there was no-one around and it was as if everyone had just disappeared.

He went on to say how the questions he was asked by an inspector from Belfast a number of days later to prove that he was who he said he was had made him angry.

He said that the Tuesday following the death was the ‘longest’ that he had always lived.